: Marx loved literature, he would hate text generator slop

: chat bots are not mechanized looms

: the image and link go to a AI slop website selling edtech which will just be used to undercut schools

Truly a bad post.

Actually, no, you can’t just pick a quote out of the middle of Chapter 15 to make a point about AI. This section is about the natural development of consciousness of the workers, after spending a lot of time describing the objective and subjective historical factors that led to the development and adoption of machinery, and the way it works upon the working class, our bodies and our minds.

The passage does not mean, “don’t blame machines (AI,)” Marx was not a moralist or a categorical analyst. This section covers some 200 years of history of industry throughout the globe, and continues with the organization of workers as a means to fight the capitalist (and the capitalist responses to such organizing.) Section 5 is conspicuously a section full of tables and factual accounting, not imperatives and conclusions.

“AI is just a tool, machines are indifferent” is the common perspective this image is supposed to lead us to. but this whole very long chapter begins with a detailed analysis distinguishing the tool from the machine. A theme that comes up often is how workers don’t use machines in production, the machines, as private capital, use the workers.

No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse! Any employment of machinery, except by capital, is to him an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore, with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman. Whoever, therefore, exposes the real state of things in the capitalistic employment of machinery, is against its employment in any way, and is an enemy of social progress! Exactly the reasoning of the celebrated Bill Sykes. “Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is knowing in anatomy? And in addition a willing help at the festive board? If you abolish the knife — you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.”

– Section 6

The footnotes to this passage continue to elaborate on the opportunistic and biased conflation of tools with machines.

If there is a summarized point to be made of chapter 15, it is that unchecked automation leads to the destruction of the minds and bodies of workers, which become composed of children and elderly, lengthening of the workdays, and dissolution of social stability by way of a division of labor driven by private profit seeking.

But it also goes into how this extreme degradation leads to the adoption of various laws and regulations on industry – and how industry’s ever-shifting nature essentially develops to a point where such regulations become practically irrelevant shortly after their adoption.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

– end of sec 9

There is one major blindspot IMO: this Chapter does not account for real, blatant, total control of the political apparatus of society as we have in the USA and the West. Everything explored here is shown to be a somewhat “natural” outcome of development of technology and machinery based on the intrinsic logic of private property relations and capitalism. It does not cover the way AI is controlled by and being used by eugenicist accellerationists who have seized a monopoly of not only industrial production, but also political power.

So, no, this line is not about AI. It is about the industrial revolution that occurred in England between approx. 1650 until about 1860. Marx’s analysis of industrialization is relevant, but IMO you can’t cherry pick a line from this chapter to understand any modern circumstance, without confusing his views and the subject to an immense degree.

Nah lol fuck “AI”

prager u ass illustration

yeah he meant sex chatbots directed at children here

The thing giving people new kinds of psychoses is not a technological advancement.

And the real use case for the actual technological advancement, machine learning, is mass surveillance. And anywhere it’s actually useful it’s already being implemented, for surveillance, weather prediction (really they’ve been using machine learning or something similar before it was a mainstream topic), planning, that sort of thing.

Even under optimistic circumstances we won’t benefit from the datacenters that are being build right now 1,2,3,4,5 or any number of years or decades into the future.

Ugh, saw this on the Leftists for AI subreddit thing. A constant switching of perspective between machine learning tools being used as tools without any fanfare, and the LLM-scam-economy grinding away at all human attainments to find new scraps of flesh to gnaw at - so they can attack critique of the latter as though it was critique of the former.

you can always rely on hexbear to have the mos reactionary takes on AI possible

Now look I know those gas chambers and incinerators seem like the issue, but we need to appreciate the marxist interpretation of how to apply them. Only luddites want them sabotaged before construction is complete, Technology enhances our abilities and this is a good thing we must remember that the relations we have to the means of extermination are the true cause of- [dead].

no you see this is different because it affects white collar workers

I’m not against small scale, decentralized or even local, specialized models that use little training data and don’t hurt the environment too much. But we must have a strategy for how to fight AI in the imperial core. And there are many reasons, the last and most pressing of which, no one even talks about:

• AI (meaning current LLMs) is born out of the failed attempts to stop deindustrialization. Since Obama, immense state funding attempted in vain to bribe capitalists to stop deindustrialization. Instead they poured it all into the most capital intensive technology ever that, best case, will lower the profit rate even more, further increasing deindustrialization, but will much rather create a massive, destructive crisis, fueling monopolization and fascism (but also potentially raising consciousness).

• The main motivation fueling this investment, is the desire to create a weapon against workers. AI is meant to destroy wages and employment, break solidarity and weaken labors negotiating position. To the degree, that AI isn’t soly a scam, to the degree that it offers us as marxists any kind of strength, these same capabilities will be wielded as a weapon against us thousandfold. Because we don’t yet control it and we won’t until the revolution. We have to face that reality. This alone makes sabotage necessary, even if we also harm our own access to this technology in the process.

• Even if AI were a complete scam, devoid of any practical use (it isn’t, but it’s very much overhyped). Capital will use it’s grip on the government to enforce AI’s intended effects anyway: by bailing them out when the bubble hits, by making us suffer for it, by forcing AI on us anyway, even if it doesn’t increase productivity, simply to save their investment.

• AI is massively destructive on the environment. (I don’t think I need to elaborate)

• AI has a massive, almost completely untapped potential for capitalist propaganda. This is the thing no one talks about. As marxists, we often falsely flatter ourselves to be immune to capitalists propaganda. Western Marxism and compatible leftism, consciously build up by the CIA over decades proof how wrong that assumption is. Yet it was done by a few targeted investments, sponsorships and endorsements. AI is on a completely different scale and I’m not just talking about biased training data. It can create a profile on you, link it with data from intelligence agencies and data miners, subtly nudge you to share your deepest fears, anxieties and traumas without even noticing. You will provide immediate feedback through your prompts, offering clues about your mood and thoughts, enabling learning against you. It will first be used to sell you junk, to create desires in you with hidden advertising. But sooner rather than later, the CIA and other intelligence agencies will be handed control over western AI and buy or force control of much of non western AI. You know they will. Don’t wait for the reveal in fifty years. They will spend billions on it. And they will absolutely use it against communists. That’s their whole deal. They will use it to find us, to turn us, to crush our hope and solidarity, to make us despair and turn towards wrong strategies that are doomed to fail. By subtly engineering answers and learning from feedback over months and years. And that’s just marxists. Imagine what they can do to average workers. Fascism could be turned up on a literal dial.

But we can still win the fight for control over AI. And we can use this struggle to win other fights. Class consciousness around AI is incredibly high and rising. We need to agitate around struggles against data centers. And the bubble will burst sooner or later, we can use this to our advantage. AI won’t disappear, so we need to gain leverage with strikes, force transparency and local models without hidden pre-prompts, restrict which professions introduce AI and on which timeline and wage struggles around wether workers or capitalists get to reap the benefits and pay for the inevitable shortcomings and failures of AI. Sabotage and rejecting AI as whole are at this point a valid strategy in this fight to win time and gain ground.

Foolish, myopic argument that does not consider the history of AI. This is, like, the third “AI” revolution that has failed to live up to its promise, and it inevitability ends up draining money away from research in that field. LLMs can be useful under certain cases, I use a one for home assistant. Maybe LLMs or a similar tech could be even more useful, but after this bubble pops and “hyperscalers” lose a shitload of money, do you think any grant will go towards furthering them at all? Every single company that researches LLMs and AI will drop them instantly.

Like most technologies that capitalists misallocate hoards of capital into, the initial premises and hopes fall flat on their face and implode, the successes of crucial technologies under capitalism always seem to happen in second-order technical developments that no one saw coming with negative and positive outcomes depending on who’s developing it.

Naturally the Chinese are leaving the West in the dust when it comes to these second-order developments, where they realized “AI’s” promise is not in outright data production (because that requires discernment that it doesn’t possess) but in data MANAGEMENT and ORGANIZING, with the data being the human input that AI verifies in math, rather than the other way around in western AI models.

Essentially, AI’s strength isn’t in universalizing automation like the Western capitalists hope, but instead in accelerating time-space compression in the technical and maintenance cycles of research and development; fields that used to take years and millions of dollars are suddenly moving at warp speed: 24/7 robotic labs can run non-stop medical experiments, engineers can design custom computer chips in days, and banks can safely upgrade decades-old software etc. All of which still requires human input, oversight, and initiative, which is why the Chinese are the only ones making progress on it while the West destroys the environment chasing a fantasy of absolute automation

Karl didnt know about climate change, the finite clock we have.

If I could Id love to see what he would make of climate change and how the successful revolutions didnt occur in heavily urbanised industrial strongholds like Germany, but rather in the perifery like Russia, China, Vietnam, nicaragua, cuba and so on. Im sure he must have written something about it.